mdbook-rss-feed 0.1.5

An mdBook preprocessor that generates a full-content RSS/Atom feed from your book
Documentation

mdbook-rss-feed

An mdBook preprocessor that generates a beautiful, full-content RSS 2.0 feed (and optional Atom) for your book.

Perfect for blogs, documentation sites, or any mdBook that you want to publish.

Features

  • Full HTML content in <description> (not just excerpts)

  • Proper XML escaping

  • Falls back to file modification time if no date in frontmatter

  • Supports date: in YAML frontmatter (RFC3339 or YYYY-MM-DD)

  • Respects config.book.title, config.book.description, and output.html.site-url

  • Zero-config, just drop it in book.toml

Installation

cargo install mdbook-rss-feed

Version Check:

mdbook-rss-feed --version

I tested this against mdbook v0.4.40 & v0.5.1.

I also tested against Rust editions 2020 & 2024

Usage

After Installing Globally:

[preprocessor.rss-feed]
renderers = ["html"]

The renderers = ["html"] configuration in the book.toml explicitly binds the preprocessor to run only when mdBook uses the HTML renderer, preventing it from executing unnecessarily for other output formats like Markdown or PDF.

Frontmatter

---
title: Debugging NixOS modules
date: 2025-11-22
author: saylesss88
description: This chapter covers debugging NixOS modules, focusing on tracing module options
and evaluating merges.
---

Adding a Description for RSS Preview

The description in the frontmatter is what will be displayed as your file preview.

The preview should contain the above description.

Hiding frontmatter in the rendered HTML

mdBook does not natively parse or remove YAML frontmatter from Markdown files, treating it as plain text during rendering, which can result in the raw YAML block (e.g., ---\ntitle: "My Chapter"\n---) appearing directly in the generated HTML output.

See: mdbook-frontmatter-strip I will add a note to this README once it's complete.

License

Apache-2.0